[First posted in February 2007]
In recent discussions of rural development policy in Thailand there is, quite rightly, an emphasis on issues of debt and savings. One aspect of local household economy that has intrigued me is the financial impact of funeral expenses. Funerals in rural Thailand (and elsewhere) are a big deal and are often spoken of in terms of their demonstration of social connections and social status. I recently spoke to one farmer who had staged a very modest funeral for his mother. The overall cost was around 85,000 baht. I don’t have a detailed picture of his (modest!) finances but I would be surprised if this represented less than 3 years income from his cash cropping activities (his primary source of income). There are other cases that I know of where funeral expenses have been an important cause of household indebtedness and I suspect that this issue became more pressing during the 1990s with the peak in “unexpected” AIDS related deaths.
Given the financial burden that funerals can represent, it is not surprising that various arrangements have been put in place to defray some of the expenses. Of course, one of the most common funeral “savings” schemes is the system of donations made by those attending. These donations can provide for a substantial proportion of the expenses, especially when there are relatively affluent donors who can “host” the provision of food on one of the days preceding the cremation. Funeral donations are, in a sense, a form of saving as they are made in the confidence that they will be reciprocated when the time comes.
And there are other, rather more formal, schemes. During my recent visit to Thailand I attended a meeting of a locally organised “welfare” group. The main purpose of the group was to provide money for funeral expenses. In all there were over 300 members. Whenever someone in the immediate family of a member died all members contributed 30 baht to help cover funeral expenses. Members were distributed over several villagers, so there was a system of locally based committee members who could quickly collect the money when a death was announced. The meeting, a rather formal affair run by one of the village headmen, endorsed a new committee and discussed various aspects of the rules (“what happens if my son brings his wife to live with us – is she covered?”).
I am aware that there are various other funeral “savings” or “insurance” schemes run by cooperatives, banks and other agencies. I would welcome any information New Mandala readers have about these. It would be useful to document some of the ways in which rural people make provision for substantial expenses. They are not all running around getting themselves into debt on mobile phones and motorbikes!
Andrew: Apart from how the funerals are funded, I would also be interested in where the money goes – was it mainly food & drink?
Do you have rough details of what the 85,000 baht was spent on?
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Although the funeral might have cost 85,000, you also have to ask how much money was made from donations from those paying their final respects.
Whether the deceased is a Thai or Chinese, it’s always customary to make a donation. After the funeral rites of a deceased relative of mine were over, the family sat down and did the accounting and we ended up making more than we spent on the bills. And we weren’t being cheap with the alms-giving! I understand this is the case for most funerals.
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Yes, that’s right. The key point of my post is that there are forms of what might be called “social saving” that are overlooked in discussion about rural household finances. Looking back over my notes I see that in the case I referred to the family recovered, from various sources, about 75,000 baht. So they had pay 10,000 baht themself.
As for what the money is spent on. I have not collected any detailed data on this. I suspect the main item is food and drink. Other expenses include transport of the body to the home from hospital, payment to the local “undertaker” for various ritual services, the coffin, the cremation “platform” (prasart), payments to monks and other ritual specialists, purchase of flowers, and sometimes payment for entertainment. And there may well be others.
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“They are not all running around getting themselves into debt on mobile phones and motorbikes!” Of course not. With a motorbike and mobile phone, why would anyone need to run around?
But thanks for that reference to my letter to the Economist, alluding to a sentence that was actually edited prior to printing, much to my chagrin. The printed version reads: “While buying motorcycles and mobile phones shored up [Thaksin’s] political base, and certainly helped “pump up domestic demand”, it did nothing to tackle the rising debt in the countryside.”
The original letter ended with “…it has also led to an increase in rural household debt, the consequences of which are not at all understood.” – a more sensible and fact-based comment that was also more tightly linked to the following paragraph.
Well-functioning debt markets can be a wonderful part of rural (or indeed any) development – but this requires effective credit scoring by lenders and productive debt management by borrowers, both of which are integral parts of any working microcredit program. I continue to look in vain for any substantial examination of either credit-scoring or productivity of TRT’s rural debt schemes; in fact at a government-hosted conference where both Mr Thaksin and Mohammed Yunus spoke, and every TRT program had lavish booths on display, not one of the bubbly presenters at any of the booths could produce any such information.
Similarly, I fail to see how a report of one family’s funeral expenses and how these were paid for provides any insight on the sustainability of rural debt. Are you claiming that there is a widespread system of group support that mitigates NPL creation, of the time created by Grameen over years of trial and error? If so, you need to show a bit more than a single observation.
Best regards,
HP Boothe
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“I fail to see how a report of one family’s funeral expenses and how these were paid for provides any insight on the sustainability of rural debt.”
I’ve noticed the same problem with reports in the news. One or two cases are cited at length when what is actually needed are hard to come by stats or more extensive examples from participant ethnography.
Sub-optimal side deals where the bank’s real estate broker or loan officer gets a cut/commission. I have anecdotal evidence of the former. The whole “auction” process on repossessed real estate that still seems to be going on was far from transparent.
“Len Share” probably accounts for a lot of savings, that is not taxed. These neighborhood funeral pools are really small sums, at least in our neighborhood. I think the emotional solidarity from people coming to your loved one’s funeral and paying their respects is a lot more important. A funeral with only one person following the coffin would be very depressing. The legalised gambling that takes place during the Ngan Sop lightens the gloom a bit.
Two more items. Motorcycle dealership penetration into villages, usurious loans, sudden “forced” repossession and resale yields hefty profits for some. Certain consumer credit companies also gave loans recently with unclear terms where the borrower could opt to defer and defer until the loan became effectively several times larger than it was. Credit alone does not do the trick.
Business plans as a focus for project based learning have become popular and are well-adapted to an environment in which small business and individual initiative has potential. Sasin Business School has business plan competitions. I designed a second year Business English curriculum around a business plan. (survey, spreadsheets, sales presentations, critical questioning, posters/advertising, brochures, model products, spokespeople, limitless opportunities for language production)
The Stock Exchange of Thailand is actively involved in designing and implementing the curriculum for teaching economics basics in elementary schools. They wrote the textbooks too.
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My sense is that the economic practices in Thailand and Cambodia are extremely different, even when the institutions look nominally similar, though I gladly admit my ethnographic experience in Thailand is extremely limited. In Cambodia, and based on my own fieldwork almost exclusively focused on funerals, the upshot of funeral finance is almost entirely dependent on a very few factors:
1. The wealth of the family
2. The social cohesion of the village
3. The relationship of the family to the monastic leadership
4. The manner of death.
The truly wealthy must spend a lot of money on funeral events. And although they recoup some of this from donations, it still ends up being a very large expense: the fees at the temple or for the mobile cremation station (called a Meru in Cambodia) are much higher, must be more elaborate, etc. More drink and food must be given, and better food. But given their wealth, even these much higher expenses represent very little compared to the proportional expenditure of the ‘respectable poor’ who must also attempt to at least hold a ceremony with drinks, food, etc. These can sink a family if they do not recoup a lot of the expense in donations.
This is where the social cohesion of the village enters the equation: in post-war Cambodia, this is a spotty issue which can in no way be geeneralized. In some of the villages I spent time in, there were highly motivated ritual specialist acaar (ajaan) or village leaders who reconstructed village-wide (or nearly so) mutual aid societies specifically surrounding the issue of funerals, so that no single funeral could sink a family. The fees were generally quite reasonable and collected personally on a monthly basis, such that there was always room for exceptions in dire circumstances. I was also told that in these communities, these strategies did not reduce the amount that was recouped in donations, which is an interested point. In villages with less cohesion and without such institutions, again, a funeral can sink a family, or can bring it reknown and new positions of prestige and access to wealth. It can be a gamble.
The relationship with the local clergy is important, but more so in the cities, where cremations are not supposed to be held in the street, but only at temples. Different temples charge different fees, depending on prestige, etc., so that different temples have wildly differing costs, and very different congregations. A good relationship with the abbot or the head funerary acaar will lower the price.
The manner of death can also change the price of course: in both directions, depending. If the family feels the need to celebrate the death in public fashion, the cost will be higher, and very few donations will be received (but those that are will often be more substantial and from closer relatives). This is not a hard and fast rule, and is being reshaped in the era of AIDS, and especially in middle and upper-class families whose new life expectancy results in more sudden deaths from stroke, heart failure, etc. If on the other hand, the death was somehow shameful to the family, or the family chooses not to celebrate the death publicly for whatever reason, the cremation can be relatively cheap. At one temple I spent a great deal of time at, the bodies of mob-murdered motorcycle suspects were burned every afternoon with no fee, since the families simply refused to claim the bodies. Similarly, since this was the only temple which would (at the time) cremate the bodies of AIDS sufferers, all these dead would be cremated here. Soem foreign NGOs helped subsidize these cremations through direct donations to the temple committee.
Of course, in the countryside, there are many families too poor to even consider any of this. A friend of mine simply cremated his father in a field and then brought as many of the bones and ashes as he could to the temple and buried them in the ground.
Apologies for length.
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that seems a little excessive. surely, the sky is the limit when people pay for this kind of things..same as wedding or ordination. but really, what’s the average and median. and how do that amounts look when normalized to their income or their net worth? are the total involved in paying the debt of the deceased and such, etc.
the danger of collecting anecdotes casually is that people tend to remember the extremes and the unusuals… and can easily lead to wrong impression, and wrong presumption in your later inquiry.. espeically if the sample size is small.
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Andrew is an anthropologist, not an economist. He’s not neccesarily interested in quantitative robustness and statistically significant populations
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The last I checked, anthropology is a social science. As a science, one assumes it would follow scientific method, and in scientific method, extrapolating individual anectodes to larger populations is a big no-no. Bystander states the case for this quite well in response #7.
Further, anthropology includes the understanding human cultural development and social customs. Economics, or the allocation of scarce resources, cannot possibly be divorced from such considerations. If one is not using scientific method or considering economic factors in their study of human communities, one has no business calling his work anthropology.
What I see here is reportage – which is all well and good, but let’s not masquerade this in a pretense of science or research. Thailand is chock full of such surface pretensions which fall apart with any serious examination – and thus serious examination is systematically missing, as Mr. Fernquest points out. The Sasin business plan competitions are an excellent example. The Thai contestants in the competition, by and large, are not entrepreneurs or innovators – they take ideas developed by others and create business plans out of them in order to compete in the contest. There’s nothing wrong with this of course, but while Thai teams regulary win the competition, I am unaware of any of these business plans actually becoming funded businesses. This is because once the contest is won, the students go on to their consulting or banking careers, the plan lies on the shelf and no one ever follows up with the actual entrepreneurs or innovators who came up with the ideas in the plan. Yet another example of surface appeal with little substance.
I would make the same comment regarding the SET’s efforts – I see mostly gloss. For example, their investor relations training program is filled with low-level coporate staff who want to learn what to put in brochures and what a website should contain, rather than understand how to segment investors and match the appropriate investors to corporate strategy.
Lack of substantive debate is a major issue in Thailand, and it irks me to see more of it, especially in a forum which could be so much more.
Best regards,
HP Boothe
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Thank you Erik for that wonderful mini ethnography.
“If the family feels the need to celebrate the death in public fashion, the cost will be higher”
This seems like a key point. The cheapest funeral is very cheap indeed. My peaceful little neighborhood in Chiang Rai has a lot of elderly people who die of old-age related illnesses quite frequently. They have very small informal and inexpensive funerals.
When I lived in Mae Sai, a place where there are many rich Chinese merchant familes, some of the funerals where quite extravagant, with fireworks even, and a big party. I have to admit, I find the whole thing depressing and don’t actively partcipate (which probably means I wouldn’t have many people coming to my funeral, if I died suddenly and unexpectedly). My family though fastidiously carries out their obligation to attend these funerals. IMHO this creates bonds of friendship between neighbors and makes a neighborhood more secure. Our neighborhood is very safe because neighbors look out for each other. (other neighborhoods are plagued by youth gangs and drugs) As a contrast, when I lived in Yangon you always had to have someone at home with bars on windows and doors. The one time an aunt left her house in Taung Okalapa unattended to go to a house warming over on Pyi St. a burglar ransacked the house and stole all the family heirlooms, i.e. funerals are part of “neighborhood security and solidarity”
Counting, collecting stats probably give a more objective picture, but one might perhaps look like a foreign spy (Thaksin’s observation that NGOs implied a loss of sovereignty) thus IMHO the need for collaboration with Thai researchers. The UC Berkeley Demography Department was doing some work in northern Thailand, but I don’t whether their data are detailed enough.
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I hate Thai funerals, whether held in Bangkok or upcountry. I hate the part where I have to suffer the long sermon by the presiding monk about what the dead had left behind (usually measurable in Baht terms) and the living should be giving more.
But for status conscious Thais, funerals are very like much like weddings, and many (of the dead) planned their funerals and the amount to be spent on them (with specific instructions to their kids) long before they coughed out their last breath.
I hate to be morbid but I get this feeling that the funeral of one Thaksin Shinawatra would be very festive, rather than mournful, for Thailand. And many are impatient to line up to give a dead Thaksin some unprintable compliments (similar to the millions of NO VOTES on ballots defaced by poetic obscenities directed at Thaksin Shinawatra)!
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Only that 1) defaced ballots counted as invalid, not as no vote; 2) most of the no vote ballots were due to the absence of the Democrat etc. parties, and thus did not necessarily constitute protest votes; and 3) a bigger proportion of people voted for Thaksin…Thus, we will also have a cremation volume celebrating Thaksin’s achievements.
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Thai constitution made meaningless , a grand airport made useless, due process rule of law disregarded, tax obligations evaded, election laws violated – - – what other Thaksin accomplishments have I missed?
Those millions of defaced votes with poetic obscenities celebrated Thaksin’s ‘achievements’ indeed!
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Those Thais who will prepare the cremation volume won’t share your views.
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Of course, in the countryside, there are many families too poor to even consider any of this. A friend of mine simply cremated his father in a field and then brought as many of the bones and ashes as he could to the temple and buried them in the ground.
I guess there are people even poorer than one’s I have met in rural Thailand. In the area I have lived, even the poorest of the poor, from what I have witnessed, are provided burial rites. The minimal cost was usually shared by the family, fellow villagers, and close neighbors. Someone would volunteer to pick up a few monks, a few of the village women would arrange to do a little cooking for guests, all of whom would donate a few baat. Usually the headman and other better off village leaders, and hapless resident Farangs, would cover any other expenses such as paying the two or three men who volunteer to insure the body is properly cremated, the pay being in the form of a few bottles of local whiskey.
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Curiously, there is a lot of research showing that increased communications (mobile phones) and increased mobility (motorcycles) do a lot more for rural development than many “development projects”, since they greatly extend the capacities and capabilities (to use Sen’s terms) of individuals, as opposed to the project sponsored by the development industry which suffer from all the usual problems of communist-style central planning.
Mr Boothe. The preferred research method of anthropology is the in-depth case study. This means taking the time, over many years, to study one or two particular sites in order to arrive at a thorough understanding of the locale, including the ways in which larger economic issues are manifested “on the ground”. It is not easy to for one researcher, like DR Walker, to combine this with large scale statistical analysis of an entire population. Most researchers are inclined to think of the two methods as complementary – for example, anthropology can aid greatly in the interpretation of statistical results – rather than hurling insults.
For a detailed defence of the case-study method, you may wish to consult Making Social Science Matter by Bent Flyvbjerg. For a case study based examination of the dismal failures of development policy that result from assuming that economic statistics are the be-all and end all, see James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine, and for a cross-case study analysis of the trend, James Scott’s Seeing Like A State. For an examination of the relationship between anthropological study and economics, try Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood’s The World of Goods. These are all well-known classics and should be available from the Chiang Mai University library.
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Mr Haughton: The “preferred method” of anthropology (and other social sciences for that matter) may be the “in-depth case study”, however this is exactly why there is so much bad anthropology (and other bad social science for that matter).
Indeed this is a major reason why social sciences are taken so much less “seriously” than “hard” sciences like biology, chemistry and physics. It is not a distinction between methodology, statistics vs. case studies, it is because for the science to be meaningful – that is, predictive – one requires both. Numerous biological, chemical and physical discoveries are made through case studies – mold growing on bread, background radiation noise, commonly used water pumps to name a few classic observations. However, these are then subject to rigorous testing to see whether it is an isolated phenomenon or more widely applicable; and this is where statistical methods are critical to make sure that what you’re seeing in one instance is common and not an aberration. Sadly, many social “scientists” such as DR Walker skip this step and go straight from what they’ve gleaned from their “in-depth case studies” to wider applicability with no applicability testing. This is wrong, it may be dangerous, and it certainly is not “science”, preferred or not. Are there any “classics” explaining how collections of competing anecdotes help in creating useful public policy available from the Chiang Mai University library?
As for “a lot of research” about development, could you point to any that specifically compare communications & increased mobility with “development projects”? It wouldn’t surprise me if it were true, and the hypothesis behind it fits my anectodal experience, but that’s not “research”. But then again, a finding of increased mobility and communications related to improved development would also raise the question of cause and effect – for indeed development does also lead to increased mobility and communications. “Development projects” are vast and varied – are you saying they are ALL “sponsored by the development industry which suffer from all the usual problems of communist-style central planning” and therefore doomed? How would you design a research methodology to compare the two? Selecting a pair of in-depth case studies perhaps?
It’s easy to make offhand comments with a vague air of credence behind them – it’s quite a different thing to call that “science”
HP Boothe
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HP: May I ask you what the textbooks are from which you have taken your epistemological and methodological wisdom, and in which year that was? Are you also a radical individualist who denies the possibility of collective terms?
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Mr. Boothe,
The epistemology and methodology of contemporary social sciences is much more complicated, pluralistic and contested that your deceptively definitive claims would suggest. But you do get to the hear to the issue in your latest post: predictability. The problem of course is that predictability in the hard sciences is easy as you are dealing with substances without consciousness. But that is most definately not the case when dealing with humans, which is why most practitioners of modern social sciences recognize the need for standards of epistemological and methodological legitimacy that don’t simply mimic the hard sciences. Social interactions among humans are emergent, dialectical and dynamic, and thus inherently UNpredictable. If science means definitive predictability, then the social sciences CANNOT be a science in those terms, from this perspective. We could get into lots of interesting debates about what adequate predictability for the social sciences should consist of, and whether in fact predictability should be the sole or even primary standard of adequacy for social scientific research, but that would involve a very long, very complicated, and very philosophical debate that would be ultimately distracting.
Suffice to say, I agree with the prior post by Mr. Haughton, and would add that there are even more models of generally accepted social scientific research beyond the statistical and the case study. I would propose, however, that your assertions about the idea (in the singular) of accepted social scientific methodology would not be widely agreed with, as you have stated them here, if you queried the governing boards of most modern social scientific disciplinary associations. I suspect that in part you are actually inserting into this discussion a debate over method and epistemology between economics and other social sciences. And we all know that economics, sociology, anthropology and other social sciences have distinctly different ideas about what consitutes adequate social science. But my main point is this: you will need a great deal more philosophical nuance and robustness in your argument to convince practitioners of other social sciences that your position is the accepted, common sense point of view.
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Mr W: “Scientific method” is not “my position” – it is a means of rational inquiry that goes back to the greeks and egyptians. If this is unfamiliar to you, I suggest a quick google search or check the wikipedia entry under “scientific method”. I would be most curious to hear “complicated, pluralistic and contested” views on this. Of course, one is free to concoct one’s views out of any method, but if it’s not scientific method, it ain’t science. Call it something else, please.
Your statement that “predictability in the hard sciences is easy” makes me wonder how much exposure you’ve had to hard sciences. Outcomes in biology, chemistry and even physics (some would say especially physics) are routinely described in terms of probability distributions – these nuances are usually lost by the time the outcomes get to a lay audience, but if you dig deeply into any result, you’ll see p-values, confidence intervals and outliers. Very few scientific results mean “definitive predictability”, and in fact major advances in science are due to the lack of being able to predict everything.
Further, I find it curious how you feel that “social interactions among humans are emergent, dialectical and dynamic, and thus inherently UNpredictable”- are you seriously claiming that social interactions are more complicated than, say, the birth of the universe, planetary evolution, liver function, or bacterial reproduction? In the absense of systematic study all of these seem like random acts of God. I would suggest that this “inherent unpredictability” of which you speak is a pretty good indication of the poor quality of work that has been done in these fields.
I’m not out to “convince practitioners of other social sciences that your position is the accepted, common sense point of view”, I understand that’s a waste of time. I am looking for approaches to social and political issues that take a scientific approach – meaning developing and testing hypotheses based on proper sampling techniques, data collection, and analysis. Sadly, all I see are varied observations and opinions. I’ve already got Fox News for that, thanks.
Best regards,
HPBoothe
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Srithanonchai: Wikipedia has a nice article on scientific method you might enjoy perusing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
The basic methodology has been around since the ancient greeks and egyptians. It’s been eye-opening to realize how few people involved with Thailand-related subjects are aware of this, but it sure does explain a lot.
I’m not sure about denying “collective terms” because I don’t know what that means. I suppose if you got a group of people to accept that 2+3=7, then among that population that would be true; but it wouldn’t help them very much in practical applications of mathematics, such as predicting the seasons or planning health care spending.
Best regards,
HP Boothe
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HP: Wow – you are reaching ever higher intellectual levels!
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hpboothe…
clearly you must be lacking intellectual engagement – all the way out there wherever you are….
your comments are becomming a tad predictable. of course you may consider that the posts from students at the ANU, Oxford and wherever else predictable and less than the standard that you set yourself, but vindictive slander only highlights the sadness of your situation as opposed to confirming your prowess. with the language you use, it appears that you would rather challenge intellectual elitism than really write comments on SEA development.
have you read ‘a handful of dust’ by evelyn waugh? maybe you would like that.
Gong Xi Fa Chai!
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Mr. Boothe,
I stand by my previous assertions, which to my mind you haven’t directly addressed, much less refuted, but merely dissmissed.
1) There is no single scientific method as an applied technique of data collection and as a method of practice, irregardless of how unified the scientific method may be as a general ontological and epistemological standpoint.
2) This diversity is reflected by the fact that the ontology, epistemology and methodology of the natural and social sciences differ. Those adjectives are significant after all. The most prominent distinction in their respective objects of study lies in whether the objects under investigation possess consciousness or not.
3) There exists valued and valuable social scientific methods beyond the quantitative and the statistical. These include but are not limited to case study methods. These various methods are also subject to evaluation according to generally accepted standards concerning proper sampling techniques, data collection and analysis.
4) Predictability of research results is much easier to achieve and much more likely in the case of the hard sciences than the social sciences. This is an issue quite separate from matters of “complexity”. In a controlled lab one can run experiments over and over and potentially achieve identical and predictable results regarding chemical reactions, etc. Such experiments are much more difficult, if not impossible, with regards to social interactions. Humans have consciousness, and therefore by extension can learn and modify their behavior, thus rendering predictability dubious. Neutrons, chemical complexes and alfala plants do not have that capacity.
5) The above four statements – which you presumably don’t agree with (I can’t tell quite honestly) – would be deemed reasonable by the major professionals social scientific associations of most modern nations (i.e. the American Sociological Association, the American Anthropological Associatioin, the American Political Science Association, etc, for example). An interesting question then becomes how it is that your individual wisdom is so much greater than their collective understanding?
Just for the record: While I am not an expert in the history, epistemology and methodology of science in general or even social science in particular, I am also not uninformed on these topics. I have a general familiarity with many of the current ideas and thinkers on these subjects. I think I shall continue to rely on their monographs for my understanding of the debates at hand rather than Wikipedia.
In addition, I actually very much share your concern for greater care and higher standards in the research techniques, data collection and data analysis of the social sciences. What I cannot agree with you on, however, is your basic presumptions about THE scientific method, which betrays to my eyes a basic misunderstanding of the complexity of the current debates on these matters and the legitimate methodological pluralism that flourishes within social scientific disciplines.
And finally, I’d appreciate it if you could cool your rhetoric and resort to less loaded and pejorative terms for describing others positions and stances. Unless that is you aren’t insterested in a conversation and a debate but merely want to enjoy the pleasure of dismissing others in an anonymous forum. Would you use the same rhetoric and arguments if you were talking to me face to face, or if this conversation were occuring at say an academic or professional conference? I suspect not. At least, I certainly hope not.
Cheers,
David
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